What this is: a build-it-yourself guide for turning one or two old computers into a proper home lab: virtual machines, containers, a shared storage box your whole house can use, and a full media library stack (Jellyfin, the download manager apps, and where the files come from), plus how to reach it from outside your house safely.
Who this is for: you have an old desktop or two, you can follow instructions, and you have never touched a hypervisor. No Linux experience assumed. Every command and every screen is explained, and each step tells you what you should see before you move on.
Time: about 1 hour for the first box (Proxmox), 45 minutes for the storage box (TrueNAS), plus however long your data takes to copy. Most of it is waiting.
The single most important thing in this guide: give every box a fixed IP address so it never moves. Everything else you can fix later by reading a screen. If a machine changes address,
